How Much Meat is a Half Beef? Explained in 3 Minutes!

Buying half of a cow is a great way to insulate yourself against price hikes and foot shortages but if you’re new to buying bulk freezer beef the process can seem a little overwhelming. This is a simple and quick explanation about how much meat you could expect to get from half of a beef.

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Food costs keep going up and there’s no sign of a slowdown, and store shelves are often empty nowadays. Buying a whole or half beef for your freezer is a great way to hedge against today’s uncertainty so you and your family don’t have to worry. Plus, buying from your local farmer or rancher supports your local community and the product you receive is often vastly superior to what you can find in the grocery store.

So if you want to buy a whole or half beef how much meat should you expect to get? For our family (2 adults, 2 young kids, and 1 infant) a half beef is about perfect for a year’s worth of food. We eat beef twice or more a week; the rest of the week is usually chicken, pork, and maybe some fish or venison.

The live weight (AKA on-the-hoof weight) of the beef is how much that animal weighs when he steps off the trailer and goes in to the processing facility. The live weight of the animals does NOT directly translate into the amount of meat; a 1200lb steer does not yield 1200lbs of beef. Once the animal is dispatched and the hide, head, and internal organs have been removed we are left with a hanging weight (AKA carcass weight). Usually on beef cattle the hanging weight is approximately 55-60% of the live weight of the animal – it can be more or less for a variety of reasons but this is generally accurate. Please be aware that DAIRY CATTLE breeds like Holsteins do NOT grow muscle like beef cattle. Once the carcass has been butchered the amount of meat you yield is generally about 60% of the hanging weight. This again is an approximation (dry-aged beef weighs less because moisture has evaporated from the meat during that process, bone-in meat weighs more than boneless, etc.) but will get you close to that number.

So for example, the beef steer in our freezer weighed about 1290lbs on the hoof. The hanging weight was 760lbs (59%), and we put about 225lbs of meat in our freezer (60% of half).

According to the American Angus Association a carcass will typically yield 31% steaks, 31% roasts, and 38% ground beef and stew meat. On our beef we ended up with 98lbs (!) of ground beef; boneless ribeyes (12), filets (10), NY strip steak (12), and boneless ribeyes (6); brisket (1), chuck roast (5), arm roast (2), rump roast (2), round roast (2), round steak, and sirloin tip steak (6); other cuts include flank steak, inner and outer skirt steaks, stew meat (10), and soup bones (4).

Our percentage of ground was likely a little higher than expected because we are trying a few less common cuts. These include chuck eye steak (cut from the center of the chuck primal), flat iron steak (2), tri tip roast (1), teres major (1), Korean style short ribs (maybe 6 packages, forgot to count them), and Osso Bucco (cross-cut foreshank, 12). To extract some of these cuts the primal must be broken down a little further, meaning more trimmings for ground beef are produced.

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